Knowledge Transfer Center

[wi:m] Wissenschaft informiert: Mehrsprachigkeit

What is our aim?

We are surrounded by multilingualism: in the family, in schools, in kindergartens, at the doctor's office, in education and politics, at work.

We want to

be a contact point for those who are interested in multilingualism and want to learn more about it

disseminate latest scientific findings on multilingualism to a broader audience

help people to make informed decisions about the handling of multilingualism in everyday life

inform a broader audience to counter widely-held myths and misunderstandings about multilingualism

contribute to the development of a multilingual society.

Who are we?

We are members of the PRIM staff (Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism), which started its work in October 2011 at the University of Potsdam.

Dr. Anna Jessen studied Italian literature and linguistics in Freiburg, wrote her master thesis on Specific Language Impairment in children, which was followed by a 6 month internship as a speech therapist. After that she moved to Berlin to start her PhD thesis on pronoun processing at different times of day. She speaks three languages and is interested in multilingualism as well as child language development and its impairments. She is now a researcher at PRIM.

Dr. Michaela Schmitz is a psycholinguist. She studied English language and literature and general linguistics at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. After moving to Berlin, she started her PhD in psycholinguistcs at the University of Potsdam. The title of her thesis is "The perception of clauses in 6- and 8-month-old German-learning infants: Influence of pause duration and the natural pause hierarchy". Besides her studies on first language acquisition, she also is interested in second language acquistion.